Raised Alone
by Sloth45
Summary: An Unspeakable trailing after Voldemort as he moves through public spaces finds a destroyed cottage and only a single living person left- A toddler. This Unspeakable is well aware of the attitudes of the wizarding public, and decides to do something about it no one had seen coming. (This story currently on hold while I focus on my second, better story.)
1. Chapter 1

October 31st, 1981.

Very few people in England knew about the Unspeakables.

They had heard of them, certainly. But nobody seemed to know _exactly_ what it was they did. This was perfectly fine, as the wizarding world, Britain or otherwise, was not prepared to know even vague details about what they were working on. This, among other factors, was a reason that rogue Unspeakables were so very, very dangerous.

One such rogue Unspeakable was currently watching a house that had suddenly burst into view as if it had silently popped back into existence from a botched Vanishing spell.

This particular Unspeakable actually knew the charm that appeared to have broken- The Fidelius Charm, an extremely ancient, extremely powerful protective charm generally cast over properties and families. It's use was only really known among the oldest of families, or otherwise every sensible witch and wizard would have cast it.

The wizarding world was at war, after all.

Or perhaps it wasn't. For the charm had fallen, and that implied the secret keeper (The only secret keeper, also implied) had died, and for such a well known family as the Potters, anyone who had known them- Or seen them, whenever the current generation's Dark Lord had ambushed them as they went about their business- would know that the potters would never willingly tell the villain after them anything. That meant betrayal, from someone close to the family, but outside it.

(This Unspeakable was _not_ part of a particular order, but well informed and able to exercise critical thought and logical reasoning. It was yet another reason why they were so much more dangerous then the average witch or wizard, who, as a whole, tended to allow their magical abilities to replace such common things entirely.)

They were not actually here to stop the Dark Lord (Dark lords seemed somewhat inevitable, and cropped up every so often), but to prevent the next one. The Hall Of Prophecies was another room available to the Unspeakables, and recorded all genuine prophecies spoken within the borders of Great Britain, yet more ancient magic at work. It contained a prophecy regarding the current Dark Lord, and one other, one that was now almost certainly proven to be in the house ahead. It was commonly held knowledge that only the people involved in a prophecy could access the white orbs that contained them, and hear it for themselves. It was far, far less well known that certain Unspeakables could also access them, for it had been decided that this, too, was something the wizarding world was better off ignorant of.

And this Unspeakable had seen two people enter, and none leave. There was the Dark Lord, and another man, someone who fidgeted and had messy mousy brown hair. Almost certainly a servant, and, given the kind of magic involved, the Betrayer. He looked like he would have rather been anywhere else, but it seems his Lord had use for him, probably to gloat, if this Dark Lord was anything like most. However, while they had both gone in (Or, at it appeared at the time, simply vanished, leaving the Unspeakable tailing the Dark Lord as he moved in public to simply wait) none had come out, including through the floo network or from Apparition.

Now that the wards had fallen, both would leave a residual trace, and neither sort of trace existed. That implied everyone had perished, but for one strange thing: a Homenum Revelio revealed one human still left, one who had not left the cottage or called for help. It was at this time that the Unspeakable finally moved, checking that their Invisibility Cloak was completely covering them (Sheer reflex, and not needed after so much time and experience with such articles) to investigate. What they found surprised even an Unspeakable, and thus was very odd indeed: A crying baby, previously muffled by the outer walls, presumably a spell cast before and unrelated to the Fidelius, and a tattered, bloodied cloak lying on the ground, next to a wand.

Though it was not regulation, this Unspeakable picked up the wand and ordered it to reveal it's history: Prior Incantato, a well known spell among those who worked in the DMLE. It's much harder to make an alibi if your own wand will reveal exactly what it was used for, though it was not quite damning evidence as wands could be stolen and used as well. Still, for diagnostic work, it was fairly invaluable, and the Unspeakable only needed to see the last spell this wand had cast: Avada Kedavra, the Killing Curse, and one of three Unforgivable curses. Such curses were simply inexcusable to use on human beings, and use of one would see you executed, if you were fortunate. The only problem being, that if this is the spell that had gone wrong for some reason (The other bodies had fallen first, as if they had managed to kill the Dark Lord, he would be lying in line of sight to one of them- He was not.), then there would be a body for the Dark Lord, as opposed to just a robe, as the Killing Curse did just that- If you were struck, you died, with no additional damage or cause. The curse could fail, but not like that- So if it wasn't the curse that had responded abnormally, it was likely the body. Curious. But that wasn't what the Unspeakable had come for. He had come for the boy.

This was a small, fragile child, an infant, currently crying alone with no direct living family in the world, though quite probably with a grandfather somewhere. This small, fragile child would also, inevitably, grow up incredibly famous and almost certainly wealthy, as the Potters were an Ancient and Most Noble house. Much would be expected of him, because the public would believe that an infant could defeat a great and terrible Dark Lord. Then again, maybe he did- But that didn't seem likely.

The Unspeakable spared a glance at their chest- There, hanging outside of their robes, was a specially enchanted device. It was most similar to another device, known as a Time Turner, currently in development. A Time Turner would allow one to go back in time- How far was currently unknown. This device, an as of yet unnamed prototype could not do so, but it could, relative to the user, slow time almost to the point of stopping it. It had tactical advantages beyond the wildest dreams of most power seeking wizards, and not even most Unspeakables knew it existed. It was almost certainly the reason the Unspeakable had not been interrupted- If this was the final target of the Dark Lord of the generation, then

_someone_ would undoubtedly know either of the Dark Lords demise or the demise of his targets, and would be shortly along to investigate. Even with time stretched, the Unspeakable only had a short time to act.

This child would soon be spirited away, likely to be exploited by those wishing ill from either side of the war, and would at the very least be expected to solve every problem of the world he was born into until the day he died. Wizards and witches were predictable, if nothing else. This is why the Unspeakable had gone rogue- He fully intended to prevent that, and to make sure this child was able to live up to the harsh expectations of the public.

But the it wasn't for the public they would do so.

And so, that night, a child was hit with a sleeping spell, a lower grade magic then a stunner, lifted, and walked far away from the house that would doubtlessly fill up with investigators soon- Ones that might have been able to trace an apparition as the Unspeakable would have.

By the time the Unspeakable had deactivated their device, and the house found, it was long empty.


	2. Chapter 2

Magic, in general, tended to be taken for granted.

Humans, in general, were also taken for granted almost as often, and could survive even far outside what was considered the 'norm' for a childhood.

The young child reached out for the apple. The small red fruit continued to hover in place in front of him, steadfastly refusing to become tangible and allow him to claim it.

He was currently in the corner of the room with the blue wall. He had lived in this room for a short while now, and while he wasn't exactly an intellectual powerhouse at one year old, he did know what this object was, and why it refused to let him touch it. It, like any other object that the room levitated in front of him over by the learning wall, would only let him obtain it if he could name it. There were letters, bright and cheerful, levitating directly above it: APPLE.

"Ah... Ah-pul!" exclaimed the young child, who gleefully clapped his hands together when the object gently fell to the ground, allowing him to victoriously pick it up and hold it aloft. He didn't like having the apple because it was food, but more because he had succeeded in obtaining it. After a short time, however, his new toy started to gently vibrate, and he placed it down with a pout. The apple flew back up to hover in front of him, and then vanished as it had appeared, just as it would have done if he had not let go of it. This did not prevent him from pouting, however.

A toy model of a red building with big doors appeared in front of him, and a new word for him to sound out and be rewarded with obtaining the latest thing in front of him appeared above it: BARN.

Magic could do quite a lot. It couldn't quite transfigure food (For it would have to be a long, long time before the nutrients could be both extracted and /used/ that if you were such an unimaginably powerful wizard, you wouldn't have to bother conjuring it), but it could store it perfectly, untouched by time, with a simple enough stasis charm. Rooms could be shrunk, fit into impossibly small outsides, while their insides stayed just as large. And, while a certain Unspeakable had yet to figure out how to allow a certain room to be completely self sustaining, they could do quite a lot. Books, borrowed from a library or bookshop, temporarily duplicated, and magically pulled apart so that every page, cover and back, could be "Memorized" and stored, in the same kind of magical memory that wizarding paintings and portraits had. It didn't have a personality like a portrait, but that did allow for better storage and recovery. Only the oldest families in Britain had a library with anything like this, for it was a rather ingenious use of magic, and magic is often taken for granted.

"Story!"

He had found his way over to the blue wall again. Unlike the red wall, where his toys appeared when he touched the square in the corner, or the orange wall, where his food would appear, smelling magically delicious with enchanted silverware to help keep it going into the boy as opposed to onto him, this particular wall was one he was used to doing more then just one thing- While it also taught him new words, it could also bring him old ones.

The room thrummed with a gentle sound, as if in confirmation, and a storybook lightly shimmered into existence before him, before gently floating down into his hands. This was a well known tomb- The Tales of Beetle the Bard. He didn't know all the stories in it, but there was one story in it his father liked to read to him sometimes: A story of three brothers. Some of the words in the book gently glowed blue, and these were the words he could pronounce. As he held the book, it too took on a soft light, and started to recite the story in a familiar voice, just like the one he remembered.

Though he wouldn't know it for some time, new books would not have the gentle voice of his parents, reflected from his memories, so this story would grow to be his favorite story in the world.

Wizards tended to think in very straightforward ways. For example, a wizard who wanted to hide might perhaps hide in a magically expanded trunk he owned, or a witch might cast a disillusionment over herself as she made her way home that night.

For an Unspeakable, these measures were not enough.

Though this particular Unspeakable did not know much about raising a child (And, indeed, had very little intention of actually coming face to face with the child they were supplying and sustaining), they did know a great deal of research, and spent an hour writing down everything that they knew how to do when it came to surviving and basic social interaction. It took an hour, because even for an Unspeakable, the chance of forgetting something so basic that it was not usually brought to mind, like breathing, was not completely minimal, and they will unwilling to risk a child's stunted development or a fatal oversight because of it. But what they did not know in raising a child, they did make up for in tactics.

A wizard might hide in an enchanted trunk. An Unspeakable could enchant a room, shrink it, enchant it, put it under Fidelius, disillusion it, render it intangible to anything that did not have magic running through it (A generally neglected spell, as wards would render it useless, and most wizards had basic wards on their homes for everything from security to magical reinforcement to those who thought the laws of physics were just getting in the way of their decorating style), and lay a series of runes into it, also shrunken, to have it evade magical signatures when it neared them, wandering around a set area, returning when called, and only having two magical signatures authorized so that it would not flee them.

While the Unspeakable was resourceful, the last property of the room was actually taken from a modified set of runes etched onto the inside of the inside of Golden Snitches. After all, not all clever devices and innovation in the magical world _had_ to come from the Unspeakables.

And while a witch might disillusion herself and simply walk home, a simple addition (So to speak, Runes were rather decisive in the way they were written, very set in stone, as it were) kept the wandering home from ever going the same way around England twice. It was a particularly complex setup, and that was not even counting the devices that would be going into the room.

But it would be at least a year before young Harry was magically potent enough for the device the Unspeakable had in mind, which was all well enough- As the unspeakable had to first create it.


	3. Chapter 3

It is a belief, one that used to be commonly held among old families, but is slowly dying out, that a child presented with the forms of many animals may find either a future animagus form or a future familiar among them. Most magical beliefs had some basis in fact, and while Unspeakables did not know everything, it was easy enough to conjure plush toys of all common and magical and magically used animals and parade them past a one and a half year old.

It was also, if somewhat rare, possible for an Unspeakable to be surprised.

At one and a half years old, Harry James Potter appeared to be fully fluent, even if he didn't quite have a very coherent structure of thought, much less speech, to have anything to talk about. Even stranger, was that it only applied to snakes.

Yes, while the young child had enjoyed playing with many toys over the past few weeks, including a lion and a griffin both (Doubtlessly something that had decorated the Potter home as a "Light side" family for some time), and as such, the temporary conjurations had been recreated out of actual materials (Different from Transfiguration, as all the materials were already there, on hand, and was a permanent change, but similar enough to the discipline to be a side note in many textbooks), but it was not the two familiar shapes that Harry babbled with cheerfully as he played that caught the interest of the Unspeakable responsible for him.

It was a snake. It was a plush snake, but it was a snake that Potter seemed to know how to replicate the sound of perfectly, though how exactly he could do so was decidedly unclear, as a small child his age from such a family would have very little exposure to snakes, especially so during the war that it appeared he had ended. Nor, indeed, did the hissing sound like the rough pronunciation of the child that was clearer and clearer over time- No, it was consistent, flowing, though what exactly it /was/ was a mystery to anyone who did not Speak. The magical ability to speak to snakes, Parseltongue, and one such wizard able to use such a rare and well-thought-of-as 'dark' language, A Parselmouth, generally didn't manifest until the child had an equal mastery over human speech. And since it was extremely unlikely the Potters had taught their child of one year such a 'dark' ability (Though it had no inherently twisting properties, it was powerful and mysterious, and many dark rituals had a use for it. Intent counted for much in magic, however), it seemed more likely it had come from another, darker source.

Like, for example, the Dark Lord he had come face to face with and, evidently, incinerated.

Most curious. The ability seemed benign so far, and the child did not have an actual conversation partner (Though, perhaps that could be secured with animation charms, but the Unspeakable had little interaction with such trinkets, often sold as merchandise) and he certainly would not trust even a magically bound snake around an infant, because relying solely on magic as a single point of failure was not a mistake they wanted to allow a possibility of around an infant. Indeed, he only seemed to enjoy a connection with it, taking more interest in it then the others, bar the lion and griffon, as the rest paraded past. Well, he would likely receive a permanent one, and then it was time for his more formal education to start: The Blue Wall, such as it was, would shortly be displaying simple animated forms and people, to see if Potter would follow, and then they could attempt to explain Accidental Magic to a toddler.

Joy.


	4. Chapter 4

Harry Potter was still in Britain, technically.

Perhaps it was time that changed.

The Unspeakable that had presently 'adopted' him, insofar as one can adopt a child who has never seen and probably never would see their caretaker, had kept the roaming safehouse that sustained and taught the in-all-likelihood "savior of the Wizarding world" (if they knew anything about how the English wizarding world thought, which they did) in the general area of "Britain" as it's set area in the runic pattern borrowed from the Golden Snitch (Thus making the largest "Stadium" known to this particular pattern) simply because that is where the Unspeakable operated, and they did need to keep up appearances.

But perhaps it would be best to move it out of Britain anyway. It was quiet so far (and it was highly unlikely anyone who wanted to manipulate the young boy would admit to 'losing' him, regardless of their actual legal claims to the specific orphan, which in all likelihood did not exist for anyone who was REALLY trying to find him), but would inevitably become blown open if the boy did not attend Hogwarts.

Which was ironic, because the boy WOULD attend Hogwarts- He was just going to be made ready first.

But back to the issue at hand. If, somehow, the Fidelius fell, much less the lesser wards, there wasn't anywhere on Earth that _someone_ would not try to track him to, "light" wizards or death eaters alike.

Perhaps, then, if you wanted to hide something from wizards, you had to look somewhere Wizards wouldn't even consider. Perhaps it was time to look into interesting muggle affairs.

It seemed muggles had been up to some very interesting things in the past few decades. Admittedly, it had taken them until 1969, but compared to wizards, they had actually been there, and Wizards didn't even consider it possible, didn't even contemplate it. It was the perfect hiding spot. The only major difficulty was getting there. The muggle way was obviously out- No series of known magical rituals could gain any one person enough magical potential to pull off a Notice Me Not on _that_ scale, even an Unspeakable, so it seemed a magical way would have to be devised. There were some dangers in traveling and on arrival that needed protections that the Unspeakable did not have spells or wards against, so it would mean research or improvision. They did have an idea, but it would take a multitude of spells working together, depending on the limitations various spells had. One particular spell that came to mind was from, of all things, Divination, in the old sense of "Magic for finding information", which had largely fallen by the wayside in favor of learning the future, which most important officials had decided to be far more important.

Well, there was still time. The boy was still growing (The attempt to teach him about accidental magic had succeeded, if a little roughly, through a series of moving pictures, like portraits not about actual people or landscapes. If you described such a portrait to most witches and wizards, the only answer you'd get from most of them was along the lines of "What's the point, then?"), and would continue his education while this new challenge was faced by his unknown protector. The room was now starting to play keep-away with his favorite toys, and the only way to retrieve them was with 'accidental' magic, trying to teach the boy it didn't have to be _accidental_ at all. (Wand magic tended to be far more potent, and easier to learn and perform, however, plus more predictable and generally safer, so it was what was taught and used, with most secondary skills like Occlumency falling by the wayside as a result, as "only magic done with a wand is _proper magic,_ a common undertone that continued to ruin any chance of a relationship between human and nonhuman magic users on a mass scale, and lead existing relationships in place, like with Goblins, strained at best.)

The boy was learning the most basic part of magic: It existed, it can be used, and how to spark it's use intuitively, if somewhat without much direction. That left an Unspeakable with one less job presently on their plate, and one far larger one ahead.


End file.
